Tag Archives: engineer

Elecronics engineer, entrepreneur, and author Jack Ganssle recently sent us information about his Finksburg, MD, workspace:

I’m in a very rural area and I value the quietness and the view out of the window over my desk. However, there are more farmers than engineers here so there’s not much of a high-tech community! I work out of the house and share an office with my wife, who handles all of my travel and administrative matters. My corner is both lab space and desk. Some of the equipment changes fairly rapidly as vendors send in gear for reviews and evaluation.

Ganssle’s desk is home to ever-changing equipment. His Agilent Technologies MSO-X-3054A mixed-signal oscilloscope is a mainstay.

The centerpiece, though, is my Agilent Technologies MSO-X-3054A mixed-signal oscilloscope. It’s 500 MHz, 4 GSps, and includes four analog channels and 16 digital channels, as well as a waveform generator and protocol analyzer. I capture a lot of oscilloscope traces for articles and talks, and the USB interface sure makes that easy. That’s pretty common on oscilloscopes, now, but being an old-timer I remember struggling with a Polaroid scope camera.

The oscilloscope’s waveform generator has somewhat slow (20-ns) rise time when making pulses, so the little circuit attached to it sharpens this to 700 ps, which is much more useful for my work. The photo shows a Siglent SDS1102CML oscilloscope on the bench that I’m currently evaluating. It’s amazing how much capability gets packed into these inexpensive instruments.

The place is actually packed with oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, but most are tucked away. I don’t know how many of those little USB oscilloscope/logic analyzers vendors have sent for reviews. I’m partial to bench instruments, but do like the fact that the USB instruments are typically quite cheap. Most have so-so analog performance but the digital sampling is generally great.

Only barely visible in the picture, under the bench there’s an oscilloscope from 1946 with a 2” CRT I got on eBay just for fun. It’s a piece of garbage with a very nonlinear timebase, but a lot of fun. The beam is aimed by moving a magnet around! Including the CRT there are only four tubes. Can you imagine making anything with just four transistors today?

The big signal generator is a Hewlett-Packward 8640B, one of the finest ever made with astonishing spectral purity and a 0.5-dB amplitude flatness across 0.5 MHz to 1 GHz. A couple of digital multimeters and a pair of power supplies are visible as well. The KORAD supply has a USB connection and a serviceable, if klunky, PC application that drives it. Sometimes an experiment needs a slowly changing voltage, which the KORAD manages pretty well.

They’re mostly packed away, but I have a ton of evaluation kits and development boards. A Xilinx MicroZed is shown on the bench. It’s is a very cool board that has a pair of Cortex-A9s plus FPGA fabric in a single chip.

I use IDEs and debuggers from, well, everyone: Microchip Technology, IAR Systems, Keil, Segger, you name it. These run on a variety of processors but, along with so many others, more and more I’m using Cortex-M series parts.

My usual lab work is either evaluating boards, products and instruments, or running experiments that turn into articles. It pains me to see so much engineering is done via superstition today. For example, people pick switch contact debounce times based on hearsay or smoke signals or something. Engineers need data, so I tested about 50 pairs of switches to determine what real bounce characteristics are. The results are on my website. Ditto for watchdog timers and other important issues embedded people deal with.

Scott Garman is more than just a Linux software engineer. He is also heavily involved with the Yocto Project, an open-source collaboration that provides tools for the embedded Linux industry. In 2013, Scott helped Intel launch the MinnowBoard, the company’s first open-hardware SBC. —Nan Price, Associate Editor

Scott Garman

NAN: Describe your current position at Intel. What types of projects have you developed?

SCOTT: I’ve worked at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center for just about four years. I began as an embedded Linux software engineer working on the Yocto Project and within the last year, I moved into a technical evangelism role representing Intel’s involvement with the MinnowBoard.

Before working at Intel, my background was in developing audio products based on embedded Linux for both consumer and industrial markets. I also started my career as a Linux system administrator in academic computing for a particle physics group.

Scott was involved with an Intel MinnowBoard robotics and computer vision demo, which took place at LinuxCon Japan in May 2013.

I’m definitely a generalist when it comes to working with Linux. I tend to bounce around between things that don’t always get the attention they need, whether it is security, developer training, or community outreach.

More specifically, I’ve developed and maintained parallel computing clusters, created sound-level management systems used at concert stadiums, worked on multi-room home audio media servers and touchscreen control systems, dug into the dark areas of the Autotools and embedded Linux build systems, and developed fun conference demos involving robotics and computer vision. I feel very fortunate to be involved with embedded Linux at this point in history—these are very exciting times!

Scott is shown working on an Intel MinnowBoard demo, which was built around an OWI Robotic Arm.

NAN: Can you tell us a little more about your involvement with the Yocto Project (www.yoctoproject.org)?

SCOTT: The Yocto Project is an effort to reduce the amount of fragmentation in the embedded Linux industry. It is centered on the OpenEmbedded build system, which offers a tremendous amount of flexibility in how you can create embedded Linux distros. It gives you the ability to customize nearly every policy of your embedded Linux system, such as which compiler optimizations you want or which binary package format you need to use. Its killer feature is a layer-based architecture that makes it easy to reuse your code to develop embedded applications that can run on multiple hardware platforms by just swapping out the board support package (BSP) layer and issuing a rebuild command.

New releases of the build system come out twice a year, in April and October.

Here, the OWI Robotic Arm is being assembled.

I’ve maintained various user space recipes (i.e., software components) within OpenEmbedded (e.g., sudo, openssh, etc.). I’ve also made various improvements to our emulation environment, which enables you to run QEMU and test your Linux images without having to install it on hardware.

I created the first version of a security tracking system to monitor Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) reports that are relevant to recipes we maintain. I also developed training materials for new developers getting started with the Yocto Project, including a very popular introductory screencast “Getting Started with the Yocto Project—New Developer Screencast Tutorial”

SCOTT: The MinnowBoard is based on Intel’s Queens Bay platform, which pairs a Tunnel Creek Atom CPU (the E640 running at 1 GHz) with the Topcliff Platform controller hub. The board has 1 GB of RAM and includes PCI Express, which powers our SATA disk support and gigabit Ethernet. It’s an SBC that’s well suited for embedded applications that can use that extra CPU and especially I/O performance.

Scott doesn’t have a dedicated workbench or garage. He says he tends to just clear off his desk, lay down some cardboard, and work on things such as the Trippy RGB Waves Kit, which is shown.

The MinnowBoard also has the embedded bus standards you’d expect, including GPIO, I2C, SPI, and even CAN (used in automotive applications) support. We have an expansion connector on the board where we route these buses, as well as two lanes of PCI Express for custom high-speed I/O expansion.

There are countless things you can do with MinnowBoard, but I’ve found it is especially well suited for projects where you want to combine embedded hardware with computing applications that benefit from higher performance (e.g., robots that use computer vision, as a central hub for home automation projects, networked video streaming appliances, etc.).

And of course it’s open hardware, which means the schematics, Gerber files, and other design files are available under a Creative Commons license. This makes it attractive for companies that want to customize the board for a commercial product; educational environments, where students can learn how boards like this are designed; or for those who want an open environment to interface their hardware projects.

I created a MinnowBoard embedded Linux board demo involving an OWI Robotic Arm. You can watch a YouTube video to see how it works.

NAN: What compelled Intel to make the MinnowBoard open hardware?

SCOTT: The main motivation for the MinnowBoard was to create an affordable Atom-based development platform for the Yocto Project. We also felt it was a great opportunity to try to release the board’s design as open hardware. It was exciting to be part of this, because the MinnowBoard is the first Atom-based embedded board to be released as open hardware and reach the market in volume.

Open hardware enables our customers to take the design and build on it in ways we couldn’t anticipate. It’s a concept that is gaining traction within Intel, as can be seen with the announcement of Intel’s open-hardware Galileo project.

NAN: What types of personal projects are you working on?

SCOTT: I’ve recently gone on an electronics kit-building binge. Just getting some practice again with my soldering iron with a well-paced project is a meditative and restorative activity for me.

Scott’s Blinky POV Kit is shown. “I don’t know what I’d do without my PanaVise Jr. [vise] and some alligator clips,” he said.

I worked on one project, the Trippy RGB Waves Kit, which includes an RGB LED and is controlled by a microcontroller. It also has an IR sensor that is intended to detect when you wave your hand over it. This can be used to trigger some behavior of the RGB LED (e.g., cycling the colors). Another project, the Blinky POV Kit, is a row of LEDs that can be programmed to create simple text or logos when you wave the device around, using image persistence.

Below is a completed JeeNode v6 Kit Scott built one weekend.

My current project is to add some wireless sensors around my home, including temperature sensors and a homebrew security system to monitor when doors get opened using 915-MHz JeeNodes. The JeeNode is a microcontroller paired with a low-power RF transceiver, which is useful for home-automation projects and sensor networks. Of course the central server for collating and reporting sensor data will be a MinnowBoard.

NAN: Tell us about your involvement in the Portland, OR, open-source developer community.

SCOTT: Portland has an amazing community of open-source developers. There is an especially strong community of web application developers, but more people are hacking on hardware nowadays, too. It’s a very social community and we have multiple nights per week where you can show up at a bar and hack on things with people.

This photo was taken in the Open Source Bridge hacker lounge, where people socialize and collaborate on projects. Here someone brought a brainwave-control game. The players are wearing electroencephalography (EEG) readers, which are strapped to their heads. The goal of the game is to use biofeedback to move the floating ball to your opponent’s side of the board.

I’d say it’s a novelty if I wasn’t so used to it already—walking into a bar or coffee shop and joining a cluster of friendly people, all with their laptops open. We have coworking spaces, such as Collective Agency, and hackerspaces, such as BrainSilo and Flux (a hackerspace focused on creating a welcoming space for women).

Take a look at Calagator to catch a glimpse of all the open-source and entrepreneurial activity going on in Portland. There are often multiple events going on every night of the week. Calagator itself is a Ruby on Rails application that was frequently developed at the bar gatherings I referred to earlier. We also have technical conferences ranging from the professional OSCON to the more grassroots and intimate Open Source Bridge.

I would unequivocally state that moving to Portland was one of the best things I did for developing a career working with open-source technologies, and in my case, on open-source projects.

System safety assessment provides a standard, generic method to identify, classify, and mitigate hazards. It is an extension of failure mode effects and criticality analysis and fault-tree analysis that is necessary for embedded controller specification.

System safety assessment was originally called ”system hazard analysis.” The name change was probably due to the system safety assessment’s positive-sounding connotation.

Columnist George Novacek (gnovacek@nexicom.net), who wrote this article published in Circuit Cellar’s January 2014 issue, is a professional engineer with a degree in Cybernetics and Closed-Loop Control. Now retired, he was most recently president of a multinational manufacturer of embedded control systems for aerospace applications. George wrote 26 feature articles for Circuit Cellar between 1999 and 2004.

I participated in design reviews where failure effect classification (e.g., hazardous, catastrophic, etc.) had to be expunged from our engineering presentations and replaced with something more positive (e.g., “issues“ instead of “problems”), lest we wanted to risk the wrath of buyers and program managers.

System safety assessment is in many ways similar to a failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) and fault-tree analysis (FTA), which I described in “Failure Mode and Criticality Analysis” (Circuit Cellar 270, 2013). However, with safety assessment, all possible system faults—including human error, electrical and mechanical subsystems’ faults, materials, and even manuals—should be analyzed. The impact of their faults and errors on the system safety must also be considered. The system hazard analysis then becomes a basis for subsystems’ specifications.

Fault Identification

Performing FMECA and FTA on your subsystem ensures all its potential faults become detected and identified. The faults’ signatures can be stored in a nonvolatile memory or communicated to a display console, but you cannot choose how the controller should respond to any one of those faults. You need the system hazard analysis to tell you what corrective action to take. The subsystem may have to revert to manual control, switch to another control channel, or enter a degraded performance mode. If you are not the system designer, you have little or no visibility of the faults’ potential impact on the system safety.
For example, an automobile consists of many subsystems (e.g., propulsion, steering, braking, entertainment, etc.). The propulsion subsystem comprises engine, transmission, fuel delivery, and possibly other subsystems. A part of the engine subsystem may include a full-authority digital engine controller (FADEC).

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Engine controllers were originally mainly mechanical devices, but with the arrival of the microprocessor, they have become highly sophisticated electronic controllers. Currently, most engines—including aircraft, marine, automotive, or utility (e.g., portable electrical generator turbines)—are controlled by some sort of a FADEC to achieve best performance and safety. A FADEC monitors the engine performance and controls the fuel flow via servomotor valves or stepper motors in response to the commanded thrust plus numerous operating conditions (e.g., atmospheric and internal pressures, external and internal engine temperatures in several locations, speed, load, etc.).

The safety assessment mostly depends on where and how essentially identical systems are being used. A car’s engine failure, for example, may be nothing more than a nuisance with little safety impact, while an aircraft engine failure could be catastrophic. Conversely, an aircraft nosewheel steer-by-wire can be automatically disconnected upon a fault. And, with a little increase of the pilots’ workload, it may be substituted by differential braking or thrust to control the plane on the ground. A similar failure of an automotive steer-by-wire system could be catastrophic for a car barreling down the freeway at 70 mph.

Analysis

System safety analysis comprises the following steps: identify and classify potential hazards and associated avoidance requirements, translate safety requirements into engineering requirements, design assessment and trade-off support to the ongoing design, assess the design’s relative compliance to requirements and document findings, direct and monitor specialized safety testing, and monitor and review test and field issues for safety trends.

The first step in hazard analysis is to identify and classify all the potential system failures. FMECA and FTA provide the necessary data. Table 1 shows an example and explains how the failure class is determined.

Does not significantly reduce system safety. Required actions are within the operator’s capabilities.

Reduces the capability of the system or operators to cope with adverse operating conditions. Can cause major illness, injury, or property damage.

Significantly reduces the capability of the system or the operator’s ability to cope with adverse conditions to the extent of causing serious or fatal injury to several people.

Total loss of system control resulting in equipment loss and/or multiple fatalities.

The next step determines each system-level failure’s frequency occurrence (see Table 2). This data comes from the failure rates calculated in the course of the reliability prediction, which I covered in my two-part article “Product Reliability” (Circuit Cellar 268–269, 2012) and in “Quality and Reliability in Design” (Circuit Cellar 272, 2013).

TABLE 2Use this information to determine the likelihood of each individual system-level failure.

Frequent

Probability of occurrence per operation is equal or greater than 1 × 10–3

Probable

Probability of occurrence per operation is less than 1 × 10–3 or greater than 1 × 10–5

Occasional

Probability of occurrence per operation is less than 1 × 10–5 or greater than 1 × 10–7

Remote

Probability of occurrence per operation is less than 1 × 10–7 or greater than 1 × 10–9

Improbable

Probability of occurrence per operation is less than 1 × 10–9

Based on the two tables, the predictive risk assessment matrix for every hazardous situation is created (see Table 3). The matrix is a composite of severity and likelihood and can be subsequently classified as low, medium, serious, or high. It is the system designer’s responsibility to evaluate the potential risk—usually with regard to some regulatory requirements—to specify the maximum hazard levels acceptable for every subsystem. The subsystems’ developers must comply with and satisfy their respective specifications. Electronic controllers in safety-critical applications must present low risk due to their subsystem fault.

The system safety assessment includes both software and hardware. For aircraft systems, the required risk level determines the development and quality assurance processes as anchored in DO-178 Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification and DO-254 Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware.

Some non-aerospace industries also use these two standards; others may have their own. Figure 1 shows a typical system development process to achieve system safety.
The common automobile power steering is, by design, inherently low risk, as it continues to steer even if the hydraulics fail. Similarly, some aircraft controls continue to be the old-fashioned cables but, like the car steering, with power augmentation. If the power fails, you just need more muscle. This is not the case with the more prevalent drive- or fly-by-wire systems.

FIGURE 1: The actions in this system-development process help ensure system safety.

Redundancy

How can the risk be mitigated to at least 109 probability for catastrophic events? The answer is redundancy. A well-designed electronic control channel can achieve about 105 probability of a single fault. That’s it. However, the FTA shows that by ANDing two such processing channels, the resulting failure probability will decrease to 1010, thus mitigating the risk to an acceptable level. An event with 109 probability of occurring is, for many systems, acceptable as just about “never happening,” but there are requirements for 1014 or even lower probability. Increasing redundancy will enable you to satisfy the specification.
Once I saw a controller comprising three independent redundant computers, with each computer also being triple redundant. Increasing safety by redundancy is why there are at least two engines on every commercial passenger carrying aircraft, two pilots, two independent hydraulic systems, two or more redundant controllers, power supplies, and so forth.

Human Engineering

Human engineering, to use military terminology, is not the least important for safety and sometimes not given sufficient attention. MIL-STD-1472F, the US Department of Defense’s Design Criteria Standard: Human Engineering, spells out many requirements and design constraints to make equipment operation and handling safe. This applies to everything, not just electrical devices.

For example, it defines the minimum size of controls if they may be operated with gloves, the maximum weight of equipment to be located above a certain height, the connectors’ location, and so forth. In my view, every engineer should look at this interesting standard.
Non-military equipment that requires some type of certification (e.g., most electrical appliances) is usually fine in terms of human engineering. Although there may not be a specific standard guiding its design in this respect, experienced certificating examiners will point out many shortcomings. But there are more than enough fancy and expensive products on the market, which makes you wonder if the designer ever tried to use the product himself.

By putting a little thought beyond just the functional design, you can make your product attractive, easy to operate, and safe. It may be as simple as asking a few people who are not involved with your design to use the product before you release it to production.

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Marilyn Wolf has created embedded computing techniques, co-founded two companies, and received several Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) distinctions. She is currently teaching at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and researching smart-energy grids.—Nan Price, Associate Editor

NAN: Do you remember your first computer engineering project?

MARILYN: My dad is an inventor. One of his stories was about using copper sewer pipe as a drum memory. In elementary school, my friend and I tried to build a computer and bought a PCB fabrication kit from RadioShack. We carefully made the switch features using masking tape and etched the board. Then we tried to solder it and found that our patterning technology outpaced our soldering technology.

NAN: You have developed many embedded computing techniques—from hardware/software co-design algorithms and real-time scheduling algorithms to distributed smart cameras and code compression. Can you provide some information about these techniques?

Marilyn Wolf

MARILYN: I was inspired to work on co-design by my boss at Bell Labs, Al Dunlop. I was working on very-large-scale integration (VLSI) CAD at the time and he brought in someone who designed consumer telephones. Those designers didn’t care a bit about our fancy VLSI because it was too expensive. They wanted help designing software for microprocessors.

Microprocessors in the 1980s were pretty small, so I started on simple problems, such as partitioning a specification into software plus a hardware accelerator. Around the turn of the millennium, we started to see some very powerful processors (e.g., the Philips Trimedia). I decided to pick up on one of my earliest interests, photography, and look at smart cameras for real-time computer vision.

That work eventually led us to form Verificon, which developed smart camera systems. We closed the company because the market for surveillance systems is very competitive.
We have started a new company, SVT Analytics, to pursue customer analytics for retail using smart camera technologies. I also continued to look at methodologies and tools for bigger software systems, yet another interest I inherited from my dad.

NAN: Tell us a little more about SVT Analytics. What services does the company provide and how does it utilize smart-camera technology?

MARILYN: We started SVT Analytics to develop customer analytics for software. Our goal is to do for bricks-and-mortar retailers what web retailers can do to learn about their customers.

On the web, retailers can track the pages customers visit, how long they stay at a page, what page they visit next, and all sorts of other statistics. Retailers use that information to suggest other things to buy, for example.

Bricks-and-mortar stores know what sells but they don’t know why. Using computer vision, we can determine how long people stay in a particular area of the store, where they came from, where they go to, or whether employees are interacting with customers.

Our experience with embedded computer vision helps us develop algorithms that are accurate but also run on inexpensive platforms. Bad data leads to bad decisions, but these systems need to be inexpensive enough to be sprinkled all around the store so they can capture a lot of data.

NAN: Can you provide a more detailed overview of the impact of IC technology on surveillance in recent years? What do you see as the most active areas for research and advancements in this field?

MARILYN: Moore’s law has advanced to the point that we can provide a huge amount of computational power on a single chip. We explored two different architectures: an FPGA accelerator with a CPU and a programmable video processor.

We were able to provide highly accurate computer vision on inexpensive platforms, about $500 per channel. Even so, we had to design our algorithms very carefully to make the best use of the compute horsepower available to us.

Computer vision can soak up as much computation as you can throw at it. Over the years, we have developed some secret sauce for reducing computational cost while maintaining sufficient accuracy.

NAN: You wrote several books, including Computers as Components: Principles of Embedded Computing System Design and Embedded Software Design and Programming of Multiprocessor System-on-Chip: Simulink and System C Case Studies. What can readers expect to gain from reading your books?

MARILYN: Computers as Components is an undergraduate text. I tried to hit the fundamentals (e.g., real-time scheduling theory, software performance analysis, and low-power computing) but wrap around real-world examples and systems.

Embedded Software Design is a research monograph that primarily came out of Katalin Popovici’s work in Ahmed Jerraya’s group. Ahmed is an old friend and collaborator.

NAN: When did you transition from engineering to teaching? What prompted this change?

MARILYN: Actually, being a professor and teaching in a classroom have surprisingly little to do with each other. I spend a lot of time funding research, writing proposals, and dealing with students.

I spent five years at Bell Labs before moving to Princeton, NJ. I thought moving to a new environment would challenge me, which is always good. And although we were very well supported at Bell Labs, ultimately we had only one customer for our ideas. At a university, you can shop around to find someone interested in what you want to do.

NAN: How long have you been at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering? What courses do you currently teach and what do you enjoy most about instructing?

MARILYN: I recently designed a new course, Physics of Computing, which is a very different take on an introduction to computer engineering. Instead of directly focusing on logic design and computer organization, we discuss the physical basis of delay and energy consumption.

You can talk about an amazingly large number of problems involving just inverters and RC circuits. We relate these basic physical phenomena to systems. For example, we figure out why dynamic RAM (DRAM) gets bigger but not faster, then see how that has driven computer architecture as DRAM has hit the memory wall.

NAN: As an engineering professor, you have some insight into what excites future engineers. With respect to electrical engineering and embedded design/programming, what are some “hot topics” your students are currently attracted to?

MARILYN: Embedded software—real-time, low-power—is everywhere. The more general term today is “cyber-physical systems,” which are systems that interact with the physical world. I am moving slowly into control-oriented software from signal/image processing. Closing the loop in a control system makes things very interesting.

My Georgia Tech colleague Eric Feron and I have a small project on jet engine control. His engine test room has a 6” thick blast window. You don’t get much more exciting than that.

NAN: That does sound exciting. Tell us more about the project and what you are exploring with it in terms of embedded software and closed-loop control systems.

MARILYN: Jet engine designers are under the same pressures now that have faced car engine designers for years: better fuel efficiency, lower emissions, lower maintenance cost, and lower noise. In the car world, CPU-based engine controllers were the critical factor that enabled car manufacturers to simultaneously improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions.

Jet engines need to incorporate more sensors and more computers to use those sensors to crunch the data in real time and figure out how to control the engine. Jet engine designers are also looking at more complex engine designs with more flaps and controls to make the best use of that sensor data.

One challenge of jet engines is the high temperatures. Jet engines are so hot that some parts of the engine would melt without careful design. We need to provide more computational power while living with the restrictions of high-temperature electronics.

NAN: Your research interests include embedded computing, smart devices, VLSI systems, and biochips. What types of projects are you currently working on?

MARILYN: I’m working on with Santiago Grivalga of Georgia Tech on smart-energy grids, which are really huge systems that would span entire countries or continents. I continue to work on VLSI-related topics, such as the work on error-aware computing that I pursued with Saibal Mukopodhyay.

I also work with my friend Shuvra Bhattacharyya on architectures for signal-processing systems. As for more unusual things, I’m working on a medical device project that is at the early stages, so I can’t say too much specifically about it.

NAN: Can you provide more specifics about your research into smart energy grids?

MARILYN: Smart-energy grids are also driven by the push for greater efficiency. In addition, renewable energy sources have different characteristics than traditional coal-fired generators. For example, because winds are so variable, the energy produced by wind generators can quickly change.

The uses of electricity are also more complex, and we see increasing opportunities to shift demand to level out generation needs. For example, electric cars need to be recharged, but that can happen during off-peak hours. But energy systems are huge. A single grid covers the eastern US from Florida to Minnesota.

To make all these improvements requires sophisticated software and careful design to ensure that the grid is highly reliable. Smart-energy grids are a prime example of Internet-based control.

We have so many devices on the grid that need to coordinate that the Internet is the only way to connect them. But the Internet isn’t very good at real-time control, so we have to be careful.

We also have to worry about security Internet-enabled devices enable smart grid operations but they also provide opportunities for tampering.

NAN: You’ve earned several distinctions. You were the recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Circuits and Systems Society Education Award and the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Award. Tell us about these experiences.

MARILYN: These awards are presented at conferences. The presentation is a very warm, happy experience. Everyone is happy. These things are time to celebrate the field and the many friends I’ve made through my work.

For my entire life, my mother has been a technology trainer for various educational institutions, so it’s probably no surprise that I ended up as an engineer with a passion for STEM education. When I heard about the Raspberry Pi, a diminutive $25 computer, my thoughts immediately turned to creating low-cost mobile computing labs. These labs could be easily and quickly loaded with a variety of programming environments, walking students through a step-by-step curriculum to teach them about computer hardware and software.

However, my time in the robotics field has made me realize that this endeavor could be so much more than a traditional computer lab. By adding actuators and sensors, these low-cost SBCs could become fully fledged robotic platforms. Leveraging the common I2C protocol, adding chains of these sensors would be incredibly easy. The SBCs could even be paired with microcontrollers to add more functionality and introduce students to embedded design.

There are many ways to introduce students to programming robot-computers, but I believe that a web-based interface is ideal. By setting up each computer as a web server, students can easily access the interface for their robot directly though the computer itself, or remotely from any web-enabled device (e.g., a smartphone or tablet). Through a web browser, these devices provide a uniform interface for remote control and even programming robotic platforms.

A server-side language (e.g., Python or PHP) can handle direct serial/I2C communications with actuators and sensors. It can also wrap more complicated robotic concepts into easily accessible functions. For example, the server-side language could handle PID and odometry control for a small rover, then provide the user functions such as “right, “left,“ and “forward“ to move the robot. These functions could be accessed through an AJAX interface directly controlled through a web browser, enabling the robot to perform simple tasks.

This web-based approach is great for an educational environment, as students can systematically pull back programming layers to learn more. Beginning students would be able to string preprogrammed movements together to make the robot perform simple tasks. Each movement could then be dissected into more basic commands, teaching students how to make their own movements by combining, rearranging, and altering these commands.

By adding more complex commands, students can even introduce autonomous behaviors into their robotic platforms. Eventually, students can be given access to the HTML user interfaces and begin to alter and customize the user interface. This small superficial step can give students insight into what they can do, spurring them ahead into the next phase.
Students can start as end users of this robotic framework, but can eventually graduate to become its developers. By mapping different commands to different functions in the server side code, students can begin to understand the links between the web interface and the code that runs it.

Kyle Granat, who wrote this essay for Circuit Cellar, is a hardware engineer at Trossen Robotics, headquarted in Downers Grove, IL. Kyle graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Computer Engineering. Kyle, who lives in Valparaiso, IN, specializes in embedded system design and is dedicated to STEM education.

Students will delve deeper into the server-side code, eventually directly controlling actuators and sensors. Once students begin to understand the electronics at a much more basic level, they will be able to improve this robotic infrastructure by adding more features and languages. While the Raspberry Pi is one of today’s more popular SBCs, a variety of SBCs (e.g., the BeagleBone and the pcDuino) lend themselves nicely to building educational robotic platforms. As the cost of these platforms decreases, it becomes even more feasible for advanced students to recreate the experience on many platforms.

We’re already seeing web-based interfaces (e.g., ArduinoPi and WebIOPi) lay down the beginnings of a web-based framework to interact with hardware on SBCs. As these frameworks evolve, and as the costs of hardware drops even further, I’m confident we’ll see educational robotic platforms built by the open-source community.

MEMBER STATUS:Scott said he started his Circuit Cellar subscription late in the last century. He chose the magazine because it had the right mix of MCU programming and electronics.

TECH INTERESTS:He has always enjoyed mixing discrete electronic projects with MCUs. In the early 1980s, he built a MCU board based on an RCA CDP1802 with wirewrap and programmed it with eight switches and a load button.

Back in the 1990s, Scott purchased a Microchip Technology PICStart Plus. “I was thrilled at how powerful and comprehensive the chip and tools were compared to the i8085 and CDP1802 devices I tinkered with years before,” he said.

RECENT EMBEDDED TECH ACQUISITION:
Scott said he recently treated himself to a brand-new Fluke 77-IV multimeter.

CURRENT PROJECTS:
Scott is building devices that can communicate through USB to MS Windows programs. “I don’t have in mind any specific system to control, it is something to learn and have fun with,” he said. “This means learning not only an embedded USB software framework, but also Microsoft Windows device drivers.”

THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF EMBEDDED TECH:
“Embedded devices are popping up everywhere—in places most people don’t even realize they are being used. It’s fun discovering where they are being applied. It is so much easier to change the microcode of an MCU or FPGA as the unit is coming off the assembly line than it is to rewire a complex circuit design,” Scott said.

“I also like Member Profile Joe Pfeiffer’s final comment in Circuit Cellar 276: Surface-mount and ASIC devices are making a ‘barrier to entry’ for the hobbyist. You can’t breadboard those things! I gotta learn a good way to make my own PCBs!”

PREFERRED MICROCONTROLLER:
His current microcontrollers of choice are the STMicroelectronics STM32 32-bit ARM Cortex and Atmel’s ATmega328.

CURRENT PROJECTS:
Tom is working on PicoDB, an open-source, NoSQL database tool for 32-bit microcontrollers written in Lua. (To learn more, visit www.lua.org/wshop12/Freund.pdf.)

THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF EMBEDDED TECH:
Tom says when he thinks about embedded technology’s future, just one phrase comes to mind: “the Internet of things.”

“In 10 to 15 years time, we will look back and think of Facebook, Twitter, and (yes) even Google as the ’Model T’ days of global networking,” he says. “That is because everything will be connected to everything at various levels of security. We and our infrastructure will be ’minded’ by unseen digital butlers that help us cope with life and its unpredictability, as well as protect that which should be kept private.”

CURRENT PROJECTS:
Dean is currently designing a hybrid solar power system to power his home automation system. “The power system will use a processor-controlled dual-input power converter design to harvest the maximum energy possible from the photovoltaic cells and then augment that with utility power as necessary to support the load,” he explained. “The system will be a hybrid between an on-grid and an off-grid system. The hybrid approach was chosen to avoid the regulatory issues with an on-grid system and the cost of batteries in an off-grid system.”

THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF EMBEDDED TECH:
“As more and more capability is being made available to the embedded world, the design opportunities are endless. I particularly find it exciting that network connectivity can now be so easily added to an embedded system so various embedded systems can communicate with each other and with the outside world via the Internet. I am concerned that so many of the new embedded parts are designed with extremely fine pitch leads, which makes DIY assembly with hand soldering a challenge,” he said.

From his grade-school Atari obsession and his teenage involvement in the L0pht Heavy Industries hacker group, to co-hosting Discovery Channel’s Prototype This! and starting his own company, Grand Idea Studio, Joe Grand has always maintained his passion for engineering. Joe and I recently discussed his journey and his lifelong love of all things engineering.—Nan Price, Associate Editor

NAN: Give us some background information. When and how did you discover electronics. What was your first project?

Joe Grand

JOE: I got involved with computers and electronics in 1982, when I was 7 years old. My first system was an Atari 400 computer, an Atari 810 floppy disk drive, and an Atari 830 acoustic coupler modem. I spent every waking hour playing computer games, trying to write my own programs, and connecting to local bulletin board systems. I was continually experimenting and questioning. I remember learning hexadecimal by poking around with a binary editor and figuring out how to replace names on game title screens with my own.
My brother, who is six years older than me, was also interested in computers and electronics. He would repair audio equipment, build telephone and computer gadgets, and disassemble broken electronics to scavenge them for parts. He had a cabinet that served as a junk bin for components and broken boards. When I did chores for him, like doing his laundry or cleaning his room, he’d let me pick something from the cabinet.

I was 13 years old when I hand-etched my first circuit board to make a “ring-busy device.” The device was simply a resistor across the tip and ring of the telephone line that had an RJ-11 plug for easy insertion/removal. It would make the telephone switch at the central office believe your phone was off the hook (thus, providing a busy signal to any incoming caller), but would still enable you to make outgoing calls. It was a fun, mischievous device, but also very practical to prevent annoying phone calls during dinner.

Right from the start, I had a strong emotional connection to all things electronic. I could just understand how technology was working even if I was unable to explain why. I knew early on that I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I wore this proudly on my sleeve, which didn’t help my ranking in the social hierarchy of elementary school!

NAN: What have been some of your influences?

JOE: In the early 1990s, when I was still a teenager, I joined a group called L0pht Heavy Industries (pronounced “loft” and spelled ell-zero-ph-t, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0pht). The L0pht was a clubhouse for Boston-area hackers who had met on local bulletin board systems and it was one of the first publicly known “hackerspaces.” The L0pht simply started as a place to store computer equipment, tinker with technology, and hang out, but it ended up as seven close-knit friends changing the face of computer security vulnerability research and disclosure.

We would examine networks, software applications, and hardware products for security flaws. If we discovered a vulnerability, we would challenge the vendor to not only acknowledge the problem, but to fix it. This is now common practice, but back then, it was a feat practically unheard of.

I looked up to the other guys in the group. All were at least six years older than me and they became my mentors (whether they knew it or not) for nearly the next decade. They helped me to focus my energy on projects that would have positive impacts for other people. They also helped reinforce the hacker mindset—that is, not being afraid to try unconventional solutions to problems, pushing the limits of technology, being dedicated to learning through constant experimentation, and sharing my passion with others. Being involved in the L0pht was a very special time for me and shaped much of how I view the world.

NAN: You grew up and went to school in Boston. How did you end up in California?

JOE: Being in Boston for nearly 28 years left me with a lot of history (both good and bad). Everywhere I looked, I had a story, a feeling, or a connection to a time or event. I needed a clean slate. I had just left @stake, a computer security consulting firm that we started out of the L0pht, and my wife (girlfriend at the time) had just finished graduate school. She was also looking for new adventures, so we packed up our stuff and drove across the country not really knowing what we were going to do when we got to California. We lived in San Diego for a few years and ultimately settled in San Francisco when I started work on Discovery Channel’s Prototype This! television show.

San Francisco was a natural fit for us, and when the show ended, we decided to stay. Being close to Silicon Valley and its electronics stores (e.g., Jameco Electronics, WeirdStuff Warehouse, and HSC Electronic Supply) is quite useful, and I always get a thrill driving by the offices of chip vendors I use on a daily basis.

NAN: You started your own product design firm, Grand Idea Studio, in 2002. Tell us about the company.

JOE: Grand Idea Studio (www.grandideastudio.com) is a product design and licensing firm specializing in consumer/household devices and modules for electronics hobbyists. I started the company to create an environment that suited me best and would enable me to focus on what I loved to do. The majority of my work stems from ideas developed in-house or with my industrial design/mechanical engineering partners. I prefer to design simple, effective devices that serve a specific purpose. I’m all for using technology—but only where it’s needed—to make a product better.

Much of my time is spent building prototypes or proof-of-concepts of ideas (though many of those don’t ever see the light of day) that are sold and/or licensed to suitable partners. Some projects I’ll release as open source (usually through a Creative Commons Attribution license), so others can learn from my experiences and build upon my work to make something better.

I also teach a hardware hacking course at public and private events (www.grandideastudio.com/portfolio/hardware-hacking-training). The course focuses on teaching board-level hardware hacking and reverse-engineering techniques and skills. It’s a combination of a lecture and hands-on exercises covering the hardware hacking process, proper use of tools and test measurement equipment, circuit board analysis and modification, embedded security, and common hardware attack vectors. The course concludes with a final hardware hacking challenge in which students must apply what they’ve learned to defeat the security mechanism of a custom circuit board. Design engineers and computer security researchers don’t often join forces. Being both, I feel like it’s part of my responsibility to help make that connection.

JOE: My most relevant and memorable engineering experience was when I worked for Continuum (formerly Design Continuum, www.continuuminnovation.com), a design and innovation consultancy based in West Newton, MA. I had worked on and off at the company during college and took a full-time engineering position in 1998. I was one of only two electrical engineers. We worked very closely with industrial designers, mechanical engineers, manufacturers, and clients to create innovative new products. Some key projects I contributed to were the A.T. Cross iPen (an early digital writing tablet) and the FluidSense FS-01 portable infusion pump (voted one of the best inventions of 2000 by Time magazine). It was during my time at Continuum that I learned about the product development and production manufacturing processes and sharpened my skills as an engineer.

NAN: Tell us about your experience working on Discovery Channel’s Prototype This! television show. Do you have a favorite project?

Prototype This! Giant Boxing Robot

JOE: Prototype This! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_This!) was a short-lived engineering entertainment show that followed the real-life design process of a unique prototype each episode. Although we only filmed for one season (comprising 13 episodes), the show gained a “cult” status of sorts among engineers and makers. It aired on Discovery Channel in the US in late 2008, but is now airing elsewhere throughout the world. The show is also available on Netflix, making it accessible to viewers who may have missed the show the first time around.

To be clear, I’m an engineer to the core, and I never had any intention of being in front of a camera as part of my job. But, the opportunity to show off engineering to the world in a way that was fun, entertaining, and somewhat educational seemed too good to pass up. Producing the show turned out to be a difficult and frustrating process, as we not only had to be on-screen television hosts trying to convey complex, technical builds in a way most viewers would understand, but we also had to actually engineer, design, build, and test the prototypes.

Prototype This! The PyroPack

We ended up building ridiculously crazy contraptions including “Mind Controlled Car” (Episode 1), giant 10’ “Boxing Robots” (Episode 2), and a “Traffic Busting Truck” that could elevate itself over other traffic and move in any direction (Episode 3). Each build had its own special flavor and design challenges and I actually enjoyed working on all of them. From an engineering point of view, I was most proud of the AirTrax control system (Episode 3), the PyroPack (Episode 6: “Robotic Firefighter Assistant”), and the underwater ROV controller (Episode 10: “Virtual Sea Adventure”). All of the documentation for my contributions to the builds, including schematics, source code, and development notes, is available at www.grandideastudio.com/prototype-this.

Ultimately, the show proved to be unsustainable (from financial and time perspectives), but it was an unforgettable experience. The best thing is how the show continues to inspire future engineers. Nearly every day I receive e-mails from viewers asking for details about a particular build or what it takes to become an engineer, and I do my best to point them in the right direction.

NAN: You’ve designed dozens of things—from computer memory-imaging tools to children’s products to medical devices. Tell us about your design process. Do you have a favorite project?

JOE: I think my design process is very typical. I start by identifying and sourcing key components for the project. I’ll put together a preliminary block diagram and then build a proof-of-concept or prototype using a breadboard or PCB (depending on complexity and/or other constraints).

If the design is an embedded system that requires firmware, I’ll start writing it as soon as the prototype hardware is ready. This lets me validate that each hardware subsystem behaves as required and, if necessary, I can easily make changes to the design.

Once the hardware design has been sufficiently proven, I’ll move to a production design and form factor. Then, I’ll finish up the firmware, refine my documentation (which I work on throughout the process), and either release the design or move to production. If things go wrong, which they can sometimes do, then I may make multiple iterations of a design before it’s ready for production.

When I’m in the throes of the design process, I’m obsessed with the work. I think about it constantly—on my daily runs, in the shower, at bedtime, and sometimes while sleeping. I try to anticipate worst-case scenarios, component tolerances, failure modes, and how the end user will interact with the device (both correctly and incorrectly).

Every project I work on is currently my favorite and each project comes with its own challenges, successes, and failures. As soon as I’m done with one project, I’m looking for the next thing to do.

DEFCON 17 Badge

I’m particularly fond of my work on the DEF CON badges. Held every summer, DEF CON (www.defcon.org) is the largest and oldest continuously running hacker event of its kind. It’s a mix of good guys, bad guys, government officials, and everyone in between, all having fun, sharing information, seeing old friends, and learning new things.

For five years (2006–2010) I had the honor of designing the official conference badges, which were artistic, fully functional electronic devices. I believe we were the first large-scale event to provide electronic badges to attendees. It changed what people have come to expect from a conference badge. The challenge was to create something that scrutinizing hackers would enjoy, appreciate, play with, and modify, while staying within the budget (around $10 per badge in 10,000-unit quantities).

Full details about the badges, along with schematics, source code, pictures, attendee hacks, and related articles, are available at www.grandideastudio.com/portfolio/defcon-x-badge (where x = 14, 15, 16, 17, 18).

NAN: Are you currently working on or planning any projects? Can you tell us about them?

JOE: There will (hopefully) never be a shortage of cool projects to work on. I like to keep multiple plates spinning at one time, though I can only talk about some of those plates.
At the recent 2013 DESIGN West conference, I released the JTAGulator (http://jtagulator.com), which is an open-source, Parallax Propeller-based hardware tool that assists in identifying on-chip debug (OCD) and/or programming connections from test points, vias, or component pads on a target device. Discovering available interfaces is a common step in hardware hacking or reverse engineering, as they are usually left unprotected and can be used to extract memory or affect the state of a system on the fly.
A few similar tools exist, but they are either incomplete, closed source, or proof of concept. I wanted to create something that could be used in actual, real-world situations and that would help new people get involved in hardware hacking. The tool will also help to highlight the insecurity of leaving OCD interfaces enabled in production devices and hopefully serve as a catalyst for change in the engineering community (where convenience often trumps security). The JTAGulator currently supports JTAG and I will be making continued refinements to the firmware to add support for additional OCD protocols.

Last year, I finished up the Emic 2 Text-to-Speech module (www.grandideastudio.com/portfolio/emic-2-text-to-speech-module), which has just started to appear in lots of interesting projects. The module is a self-contained, multi-language voice synthesizer that converts a stream of digital text into natural-sounding speech. It’s based on the Epson S1V30120 text-to-speech (TTS) IC, which uses the familiar DECtalk engine and is easy to interface to any microcontroller through a standard serial interface. Though embedded speech synthesis has been around for a while, there was no small form factor, low-cost solution readily available. So, I made one. A search for “Emic 2” on YouTube will result in various projects that use the module, including a tweet reader, a color-to-voice converter, a talking thermometer, an interaction with Apple’s Siri, and some singing demonstrations.

Some other projects I have planned include experimenting with PCB reverse-engineering techniques, hacking with a BeagleBone Black and OpenCV, and designing a new RFID system.

NAN: What do you consider to be the “next big thing” in the embedded design industry?

JOE: I’ve been increasingly concerned with the improper and (sometimes) socially unacceptable use of technology. From cameras at every street corner to mobile devices tracking your every move to Facebook and Google (among others) controlling your personal data, privacy has become something we’re slowly (and willingly?) losing. It’s a slippery slope that I don’t think many people will notice until it’s too late. The problem is largely driven by our society’s mass adoption of technology and taking that technology for granted. As an engineer and hacker, I strive to educate others about the unintended consequences of blindly using technology and hope it will make them more aware.

Location: Stony Plain, AB, Canada (Stony Plain is suburb of Edmonton, home of the Oilers)

Education: MS, the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, SK, Canada

Occupation: Gordon is semi-retired. He used to be an Electronics Technology and Computer Engineering Technology instructor at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton.

Member Status: Gordon says he used to have Circuit Cellar issues dating back to 1995. “We were getting issues under the ‘college program’ then,” he explained. Later, his department subscribed to the magazine and the issues came directly to Gordon. Then he obtained a personal subscription. “I still have my paper copies containing my own articles. And we bought the CDs to get all the back issues.”

Technical Interests: Gordon has always been interested in electronics, both as a hobby and as a profession. He focused first on audio, then turned to microcontrollers. He has built a few microcontroller-based instruments, some of which have been the topics of his Circuit Cellar articles. “For a time, I was involved in building microcontroller-based dog training equipment. I built a microcontroller-based weather station, which I also wrote an article about. I have several microcontroller-based projects in my home that are specific to my needs. My cold-room temperature controller is microcontroller-based, for example.”

COLIN: I’m currently living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. I’m originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and had been living in Edinburgh, Scotland for almost two years before I moved to Halifax.

NAN: How did you become interested in electronics?

COLIN: Like many people in this area, I did start at a very young age. If I had to pin one event as the starting of my life-long interest in electronics, it was getting one of those “20-in-1” kits from RadioShack as a present. My parents always encouraged my interest in electronics, but as they were a commercial airline pilot and a chartered accountant, it wasn’t the case of them initially pushing me in the same direction they started!

My dad found me a few small “learn-to-solder” kits, which I enjoyed. At age 8, I assembled my first real kit, the LED-Tric Christmas tree featured in the December 1994 issue of Popular Electronics. My parents have kept bringing that tree out as a Christmas decoration every year since, and it still works.

Besides my parents, I also had help from local people interested in electronics and became friends with many of the local electronics store owners. I spent many hours building projects from magazines like Electronics Now, Popular Electronics, Circuit Cellar, and the various Forrest M. Mims III books. I find it interesting to see the recent surge in “maker” culture. It’s something that has really been going on for years. Growing up, there wasn’t such a thing as maker spaces, but there were local people with interesting workshops who would share projects. It’s great to see this a little more mainstream now, as it means more opportunities for people to get involved at any stage of their life in this fascinating world.

NAN: What is your current occupation? Are you still consulting for projects related to 802.15.4 wireless communications?

COLIN: I’m currently a graduate student at Dalhousie University pursuing a PhD. I decided to go back to school for the chance to do more “pure” research. It’s also fun to have access to a range of tools I wouldn’t otherwise get—the lab I sit in has an anechoic chamber, for example. And we have most of the latest versions of high-end software like MATLAB (including most of the add-ons), 3-D electromagnetic antenna simulation software, FPGA design software, and so forth.

RadioBlocks

I’m only loosely involved in 802.15.4 projects for now, and not actively following the latest developments and standards. Having said that, a friend of mine has gotten involved in creating small, wireless modules called RadioBlocks.

They use an IEEE 802.15.4 radio combined with a small ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller. They use an open-source mesh networking software we created called SimpleMesh, so most of my recent work on 802.15.4 has been around this project. The mesh software is designed to do the basic job of sending a block of data to another node, and otherwise staying out of the way. I previously did a lot of work using IPv6 on such small sensor networks, but haven’t been active in that area lately.

At Dalhousie, I’m working on the area of side-channel analysis of cryptographic systems, specifically power analysis. This area has a simple idea: if you have a microcontroller or other embedded controller, it typically has some internal data bus. When those data lines switch state, it takes power. But the power actually depends on the data. Imagine a databus switching from all 1s to all 0s in a clock cycle, compared to staying at all 1s. Likewise, different operations, such as a MUL compared to a LDI, have different power signatures. If you measure the current consumption on each clock cycle, you can learn something about the data being processed, and then often the secret key. Practically speaking, you can measure this current even with an electromagnetic probe, so you don’t need to physically modify the circuit board.

I gave a presentation at Black Hat Abu Dhabi in December 2012 about some of this work. If you are interested, the slides and white paper are available online at Blackhat.com, or from my personal website NewAE.com. You can see the photo above showing an example of attacking a microcontroller-based smart card. The capture software might look something like where you can see different computations the card is performing directly from the power trace. In this case, each burst is a round of the AES-128 computation.

NAN: Many of your projects include Atmel microcontrollers. Why Atmel?

COLIN: It’s no secret I’ve been a big fan of Atmel’s AVR microcontroller, but it wasn’t my first. I don’t know the exact lineage of my microcontroller work, but one of the first things I learned on was an AMD 2900 Evaluation and Learning Kit. A local electronics store happened to have it in stock. They had gotten it from someone cleaning out old inventory, as even at that time it was old. I added heatsinks, as the several amps it drew when powered with 5 V made a lot of those chips very hot. And, of course, you had to keep the entire board powered up if you didn’t want to lose you program you’d been manually entering. From there, I moved onto a Z80 trainer board, which let you program with a hex-entry keypad, and eventually I moved onto programming it from the computer. I designed a Z80 computer board but never built it—I still have the piece of transparency with the taped out PCB design and photosensitive PCB on which I was to expose it. That’s more than 10 years old now, so I suspect the chemicals in it have degraded a little!

I forget exactly why I picked up the AVRs, but I had one of the first AVRs released, Atmel’s AT90S1200, which I programmed in Assembly. After Assembly, I programmed them in BASIC (using MCS Electronics’s BASCOM-AVR), going as far to write a neural network in

BASCOM-AVR. Even today, I think BASIC gets a bad rap. It was almost the original “Arduino” environment, as you could drop down LCD drivers, ADC, and so forth without ever knowing much about how it worked, and with a really intuitive feel. I moved onto C sometime later, and used C almost exclusively for embedded development since. For some time, I was fairly involved in the tools used in the AVR world, such as WinAVR. Atmel donated a considerable amount of equipment to me, as at the time I was a high school student using these devices for science fair projects. I think that’s a great example of how such corporate donations pay off. I’ve almost exclusively used AVR processors since I am so familiar with them because of that. In addition, as a student with little money but lots of time, I was happy to spend hours each day on AVRFreaks.net or working on open-source tools. While Atmel probably ended up giving me around $3,000 worth of tools, I’m sure the value of work I performed for free in terms of open-source tool contributions or forum posts would be worth many times this.

A funny story around all this work: In undergrad, we used the Atmel AVR microcontrollers. During one of the first labs they distributed a tutorial on how to set up the WinAVR tools and compile your first program. As it turned out, this guide was something I wrote years prior and had posted to the WinAVR website. Sufficient to say, I did OK in that class.

NAN: Tell us about NewAE.com. What kind of information is available on the site?

COLIN: I’ve run NewAE.com since 2001, although it’s not really designed to be the type of website one checks for new content daily. If I’ve spent some time solving a problem that I think other people could use, I’ll put a post up. Sometimes this is a complete project, such as my IEEE 802.15.4 sniffer. Sometimes it’s just a small post, such as how to set up the AVR USB keyboard for 5-V operation, which wasn’t described in the manual. I also use it for keeping copies of any published papers or presentations.

I’ve more recently been posting some ongoing research to the site, including blog posts with ongoing projects, rather than just waiting until it’s completely finished! In that vein, I started a YouTube channel with some technical videos (www.youtube.com/user/colinpoflynn). A big collection of these are from when I taught a digital logic course and recorded all my presentations from that.

My content spans a huge range of topics—everything from showing my students how to get screen captures, to a demonstration of my soldering station, to recordings of my academic paper presentations. I don’t like duplicating work. I’ll only go to the effort of making a video or website post if I really couldn’t find the information elsewhere. Because of this, I don’t have one specific topic you could expect to learn about. I’ve never been aiming to be like EEVBlog!

NAN: You wrote “It’s a SNAP: A Flexible Communications Protocol” (Circuit Cellar 139, 2002) more than 10 years ago. Do you still use SNAP in any of your current projects?

COLIN: I have to admit that I haven’t used SNAP in probably eight years! Of course now, when needing to network devices, I’m more likely to turn to a wireless standard.

NAN: Your article “Open-Source AVR Development” (Circuit Cellar 196, 2006) provides an introduction to the AVR-GCC toolchain for AVR microcontrollers. The article references the Cygwin project and Sourceforge’s WinAVR project. How do these components work in the design?

COLIN: The Cygwin project is still something I use regularly, as it lets you run a variety of Unix-like tools on Windows. The Linux command line is extraordinarily powerful, and it is makes it simple to access things like C compilers, text parsing utilities, and scripting tools. With Cygwin, one can have a Linux-like experience under Windows, which I used in that article to build some of the tools you are developing for AVR. By comparison, WinAVR is just a number of prebuilt tools for the AVR development. While it’s more work to build your own tools, sometimes you require special features that were not available in the premade tools.

NAN: Atmel products have played a starring role in several articles you have published in Circuit Cellar. For example, an AT90S4433 microcontroller was featured in “It’s a SNAP: A Flexible Communications Protocol” (Circuit Cellar 139, 2002), an ATmega88 AVR RISC microcontroller was featured in “Digital Video in an Embedded System” (issue 184, 2005), an AT45DB041 DataFlash and an ATmega88 microcontroller were featured in “Open-Source AVR Development” (issue 187, 2006), and an AT90USBKEY demonstration board was featured in “Advanced USB Design Debugging” (issue 241, 2010). Why Atmel microcontrollers/boards? What do you prefer about these products?

COLIN: As I mentioned before, I have a long history with Atmel products. Because of this, I already have the debug toolchains for their chips and can get projects up very quickly.

When picking boards or products, one of the most important considerations for me is that readers can buy it easily. For me, this means I can get it at DigiKey (and I’ll check Farnell for our UK friends). Part of this comes from being in Canada, where DigiKey was one of the first distributors offering cheap and fast shipping to Canada.

NAN: Are you currently working on or planning any microprocessor-based projects?

Binary Explorer Board

COLIN: My current big project is something I designed over the summer of 2012. It’s called the Binary Explorer Board and is something I used when teaching a course in digital logic at Dalhousie University. I needed a simple, programmable logic board and nothing I could find was exactly right. In particular, I needed something with an integrated programmer, several switches and LEDs, and an integrated breadboard. The students needed to be able to use the breadboard without the CPLD to learn about discretely packaged parts. All the CPLD-based trainers I found didn’t have exactly what I wanted in this regard.

The embedded part is the USB interface using an Atmel AT90USB162 microcontroller, although I plan on later upgrading that to an XMEGA for lower cost and more code room. The firmware is powered by Dean Camera’s excellent open-source USB library called LUFA (www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php). This firmware lets students program the CPLD on the board easily over USB. But the cool thing is you can go even further and use the device as a generic programmer for other AVRs or CPLDs/FPGAs. For example, you can mount an AVR on the breadboard, connect it to the USB interface, and program that through the Arduino IDE. The entire board would retail for $35 in single-unit quantity, so it’s cheaper than most textbooks. I’m working on making it a real product with Colorado Micro Devices right now.

The design environment is the standard Xilinx toolchain, although I’ve made a number of predefined projects to make it simple enough for students with zero previous design experience to use. The idea is to get students familiar with the real tools they might see in the industry. Around this project, it’s interesting to note I choose a Xilinx CPLD because of my familiarity with Xilinx devices and design tools. This familiarity comes from years ago when Xilinx donated to me a part for a project I was working on. Now throngs of students will be exposed to Xilinx devices, all because Xilinx was willing to donate some parts to a student.

There is always an assortment of half-finished projects, too. I started designing a battery tester, which could simulate characteristics you’d typically see when driving small wireless nodes from coin-cell batteries. I started planning on using an AVR USB microcontroller and doing all the data logging myself. I then found this LabJack device, which simplified my life a lot, as they had basically a generic USB-based logging/control module.

NAN: What do you consider to be the “next big thing” in the embedded design industry?

COLIN: Wireless and the “Internet of Things” will eventually be a big thing, which means design engineers will need to become more familiar with things like protocols and realistic transmission characteristics. I use the word “realistic,” as part of this world is separating hype from reality. There’s certainly a huge disconnect between the marketing hype around all these various wireless protocols and how well they work in practice. When designing a product that will use a wireless technology, it’s likely some commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) module will be used, so the engineer may think they can remain blissfully unaware of RF or networking things. But the engineer still needs to have a rough idea about how many devices might fit in an area on a single network or the advantage of selecting certain protocols.

Another thing of interest to me is programmable logic, such as FPGAs. It’s been interesting to see the tools that try to turn anybody into an FPGA designer becoming more mainstream, or at least letting you program FPGAs in more common languages (e.g., C/C++). They are still fairly specialized and more likely to be used by a hardware engineer looking to improve productivity, compared to a software engineer who needs to offload an algorithm into a FPGA. But I think they could fairly quickly get to the point that engineers with some FPGA experience could implement considerably more complex designs than they would have otherwise been able to had they been required to design everything from scratch.

In a somewhat similar vein, we are starting to see the availability of multicore devices coming down to embedded levels. Learning to program them in a way to take advantage of these new cores is a useful skill to pick up. I recently started using both the OpenMP API and Cilk++ development software on some of my programs. My work wasn’t targeting an embedded project, but instead regular full-size multicore computers, but it’s still a useful (and fairly simple) skill to pick up.

NAN: Tell us a little about your workbench. What are some of your favorite design tools?

Colin’s Workbench

COLIN: My initial workbench was the kitchen table, although other family members were frequently concerned about eating in the same space as these various items with warning labels about lead. My next workbench was a long, custom-built bench in Hamilton, Ontario. My current bench in Halifax was again custom-built, and I’ll take you few of its features. I’d like to point out by “custom-built” I mean built by myself with a jigsaw and some plywood, not an artesian finely crafted piece of furniture.

Due to a back injury, I work standing up, which you can’t see in the photo. It’s actually quite refreshing, and combined with a good quality antifatigue mat and stool to lean up against means I can work long hours without tiring. A cover comes down to hide everything in my desk, which was a feature partially required by my significant other, who didn’t want guests to see the typical mess of wires it contains. When closed, it also gives it some protection against any rogue water leaks. For my computer, I use a trackball instead of a mouse, and the keyboard and trackball are mounted on a plate tilted underneath the desk in a “negative” tilt angle, adjusted to most natural angle. And, because there is no way to see the keyboard while typing, it tends to keep anyone else from borrowing my computer to look something up!

I’ve wired a ground fault interrupter (GFI) into the desk, so all my power outlets are protected. If I ever did something dumb like dropping a scope ground on a live wire, the GFI socket would at least give me a hope of protecting the scope and myself. There are many outlets above and below the desk, and also a ground jack for the antistatic strap beside the thermal wire strippers. The outlets under the desk let me plug in things in a hidden manner—printers, USB hubs, and other permanent devices get wired in there. I’ve wired a number of USB hubs to the top of my desk, so I typically have around 12 free USB slots. You always seem to run out otherwise!

Most of my tools are off the desk and stored in the drawers to either side. I made the “drawers” just pieces of wood with minimal sides—the idea being most of the time you are placing PCBs or tools down, so the lack of high sides prevents you from piling too much into them! All the cables get stored on hooks to the left of my desk, and I’ve got a whiteboard that sticks up when I’m working on a problem.

SMD Organization

I store all my SMD parts in small envelopes stored in index card holders in the bottom left of my desk. While I’m not a static-phobic, I also didn’t want to use plastic film strips or plastic bags. So the paper envelopes at least I hope don’t generate much static, even if they don’t dissipate it. It’s very easy to label all your parts and also this system holds up to a high dynamic range of stock numbers. For example, capacitors get split into 10.1–99.9 nF, 100 nF, 100.1–999.9 nF, and so forth. Because you seem to end up with loads of 100-nF capacitors, they get their own envelope. It’s trivial to change this division around as you get more parts, or to group part sizes together.

In terms of interesting tools: my soldering station is probably my favorite tool, a Metcal MX500 I got used from eBay. The response time on these is unbelievable. I put a video up to show people just because I’ve been so impressed with it. There are other manufactures that now make stations with the same RF-heating technology I believe, and I always encourage everyone to try one. I’ve been using the DG8SAQ Vector Network Analyzer (VNWA) for a while too. It’s a very affordable way to get familiar with VNA and RF measurements. It’s especially fun to follow along with some of the “Darker Side” columns in Circuit Cellar. Rather than just hearing about the mysterious world of RF, you can do experiments like viewing the response of several different decoupling capacitors mounted in parallel. I’ve got an old TiePie TiePieSCOPE HS801 parallel-port oscilloscope mounted underneath my desk, and still use it today. A lot of my work is digital, so have an Intronix LogicPort digital analyzer, a Beagle USB 480 protocol analyzer, and oodles of microcontroller programming/debug tools from different manufacturers.

Electrical engineers and embedded programmers can expect to work several different jobs over the course of their careers. In the mid- to late-20th century, an engineer could expect to find a job with a large company, work it for 25 or 30 years, and then retire with a pension. But today things are different. For instance, over a 20-year period, the average engineer or programmer who reads Circuit Cellar might work for a handful of different corporations, start a business, work on contract projects, and even bill hours as a consultant. Others will move between industry and academia, serve as managers, and hold positions on corporate boards.

To excel during the course of a long tech career in the 21st century, you’ll need to continuously hone your communication skills much like you do your hardware and software abilities. You must practice self awareness in order to assess your amiability, approachability, and listening skills. And you should continuously endeavor to keep your communication skills up to snuff by staying on top of advances in social media and business-standard communication protocols. While some jobs will require you to work long hours alone, the success of others will require you to check your ego at the door and let your client have his or her say. It won’t be easy. But the sooner you start focusing on strengthening your communication skills the better off you’ll be. As Steve Ciarcia notes in “Managing Expectations” (Circuit Cellar 266), your success will be based on “the art of managing expectation in the eyes of others.” Ciarcia writes:

I have a theory. People are a lot more comfortable when they can predict the future, or at least if they think they can. Look at all the resources we put into forecasting the weather or economic conditions, despite the fact that we know these are complex, chaotic systems whose sensitivity to initial conditions makes any long-term predictions less dependable. This applies on a personal level, too. We have developed protocols that help us interact with each other. We say “hello” when we pick up the phone. We shake hands when we meet for the first time. These protocols (i.e., “social customs”) help us control the process of learning about each other—what we need and what we can provide in a relationship.

Communication “protocol” is particularly important in the relationship between an engineer and his client. There is a huge amount of diversity in such a relationship. Unstated assumptions can lead to enormous gaps in expectations resulting in disappointment, frustration, anger, or even legal action in extreme cases.

Despite the fact that human resource types tend to treat engineers as interchangeable cogs in a machine, individual engineers may have distinctly different talents. Some have extensive expertise in a particular technology. Others have more general system-level design skills along with an ability to pick up the finer points of new technologies “on the fly.” Some are good at communicating with clients and developing system concepts from vague requirements, while others need to dig into the minutiae of functional specifications before defining low-level implementation details.

As an engineer, it is important to recognize where your talents lie in this broad spectrum of possibilities, and to be honest about them when describing yourself to coworkers and potential clients. Be especially careful with people who are going to represent you to others, such as headhunters and engineering services brokers. Resist the urge to “inflate” your capabilities. They’ll be doing that on your behalf, and you don’t want to compound the problem.

Similarly, engineering services customers come in all shapes and sizes. Some only have a vague product idea they want to develop, while others may have a specific description of what needs to be solved. Some small companies will want you to manage the entire product development process, while larger ones have management systems (i.e., bureaucracies) and will expect you to work within established procedures. Some will want you to work onsite using their equipment, while others will expect you to have your own workspace, support infrastructure, elaborate test equipment, and so forth.

In any case, from the customer’s point of view, there are risks to using outside engineering services. How much are they going to have to spend? What are the chances of success at that level of expenditure? Unless there are unusually large, nonrecurring engineering (NRE) charges associated with the project, labor will be the customer’s biggest expense. The obvious question is: How much time is it going to take? These are questions that are sometimes difficult to answer at a project’s inception, especially if the requirements are poorly defined. It may become necessary to guide the customer through a process of discovery that delineates individual project steps in terms of cost and accomplishment for each step. These early iterations could include things like a feasibility study or a detailed functional specification.

Generally, the customer is going to ask for a fixed-price arrangement, but beware. As the engineer, this means you are assuming all the risk. If the schedule slips or problems crop up, you are the one who will take the loss. Fixed-price contracts are a tough equilibrium. Invariably, they involve padding time estimates to balance the risk-benefit ratio, but not so much that you price yourself out of the job in the first place. A better consulting situation is a time and materials contract that puts more of the risk back on the customer and provides flexibility for unforeseen glitches. Knowledgeable customers should understand and be okay with this.

The point is, you need to be willing to take the lead and let the customer know what is happening now and every step of the way. That way, they don’t get surprised, particularly in a negative way. Since we can’t assume every consulting customer is reading my editorial, it’s up to you to explain these issues. Do it right, and you’ll have a positive foundation on which to build your relationship. And, even though I have been directing my remarks primarily to independent consultants and contractors, as an engineer, you are providing your services to others. Even as a full-time employee in a company where your only “customers” are other departments (i.e., manufacturing or testing), these principles still apply. While your present salary is a given, its future progress and longevity is all about the art of managing expectations in the eyes of others.